During the intense training sessions, Lu Chen's "World Will" resonance picked up a strange anomaly. Amidst the thousands of disciples, one young girl from the Divine Medicine Valley—a shy, Rank 2 healer named Lin'er—wasn't just thinning her soul; she was unintentionally absorbing the spatial friction caused by the Zero-Point Blade.
Lu Chen watched Lin'er from the shadows of the training hall. While others struggled to maintain the Void-Breathing technique, the air around her simply... ceased to exist. She possessed a rare, ancient constitution known as the "Aether Void Heart."
He called her to the inner sanctum, where Yue Xiao was tempering the Zero-Point Blade. The moment Lin'er approached, the hilt of the sword hummed with a violent, hungry joy. The spatial distortion around the blade stabilized instantly, becoming ten times sharper.
"Chen," Yue Xiao whispered, her face pale. "The sword... it's feeding on her presence. If we integrate her Qi into the final forging, the Zero-Point Blade won't just cut space. It will be able to pierce Fang Yuan's 'Immortality Domain'."
Lu Chen looked at the trembling girl. Lin'er wasn't a warrior. She was a healer who spent her days tending to gardens.
"To make the blade perfect," Lu Chen said, his voice heavy with the guilt of a thousand years, "she doesn't have to die. But she would have to become the 'Living Core' of the sword. She would lose her physical form, her memories, and her future. She would become a sentient weapon."
Lin'er looked at the burning countdown in the sky, then at the exhausted faces of the disciples outside. She looked at Lu Chen, seeing the scars of time in his eyes.
"In the future you saw," she asked softly, "did I survive?"
Lu Chen looked away. "No. You were among the first to be refined into a pill. You died screaming in the dark."
Lin'er reached out and touched the hilt of the Zero-Point Blade. The spatial distortion didn't cut her; it embraced her. "Then I choose this. I'd rather be the sword that strikes the monster than the grain that feeds him."
Lu Chen felt a cold shiver. To save the world, he was becoming the very thing he hated: a man who traded lives for power. But he knew that without Lin'er, the blade would shatter upon hitting Fang Yuan's skin